Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told Izvestia on Thursday that Moscow would respond to the European Union’s newest sanctions package with “effective and tough” measures. She did not say what those measures would be.
The European Council adopted the package on June 15, freezing the assets of 34 individuals and 47 entities tied to Russia’s military-industrial complex, its shadow-fleet shipping network, and its state propaganda apparatus.
Twenty-plus rounds of EU restrictions since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine have sanctioned over 600 vessels and frozen close to $300 billion in Russian central bank reserves. Four years on, the open question is no longer whether the sanctions exist — it is who actually carries their cost.
Thirty-Four Names, Forty-Seven Firms
The June 15 package runs across three tracks. It lists seven individuals and 21 entities tied to drone and military-equipment supply chains, alongside two oil traders and 24 companies linked to Russia’s shadow-fleet shipping network.
A separate listing targets ten propagandists accused of spreading state disinformation justifying the war. It runs alongside a larger, separate 21st sanctions package still under negotiation.
That pending package would freeze assets at close to 90 banks and impose transaction bans on more than 30 additional banks, crypto platforms, and oil traders operating in third countries.
The phrasing in Moscow’s response is not new. Zakharova used nearly identical language — “effective and tough measures will follow” — after the EU’s 19th sanctions package in October 2025. Eight months and one more package later, the script has not changed.
Zakharova argued the pressure undermines global food and energy security and increasingly strikes companies and individuals in countries with no role in the war. She did not specify what Moscow’s countermeasures would actually be.
Brussels’ Case for the Pressure Campaign
Brussels has its own numbers. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told reporters in Southern Cyprus this month that Western sanctions have cost Russia an estimated $1.2 to $1.5 trillion since 2022.
“Putin is losing money, men and momentum,” Kallas said, framing the war as a steadily worsening position for Moscow rather than a stalemate. The pending package would add to a mechanism already covering more than 2,700 individuals and entities under the EU’s Ukraine-related sanctions regime.
The shadow-fleet measures are the sharpest tool in that mechanism. Over 600 vessels are already barred from EU ports and EU-flagged maritime services, with 30 more proposed for listing.
For the first time, the package would also sanction ships caught refuelling or otherwise servicing already-blacklisted tankers. On paper, this is an architecture built to squeeze Russian oil revenue at every node of the supply chain, not just at the point of sale.
What Four Years of Trade Data Show
Russia’s GDP contracted 2.1 percent in 2022 and returned to growth the following year — far short of the collapse predicted at the war’s outset, according to several Western economic institutes.
Analysts at the Quincy Institute describe Russia’s economy as too embedded in global supply chains for sanctions to dislodge it. New evasion routes open about as fast as Western regulators close old ones.
Trade data for March 2026 show why. China alone accounted for 43 percent of Russia’s fossil-fuel export revenue that month — more than four of every ten dollars Moscow earned from energy sales.
India, the second-largest buyer, raised its share of Russian crude from roughly 2 percent of its import basket before the war to above 40 percent at points in 2024. It has held in the mid-to-high 30s through 2026 — adjustment, not abandonment.
Brussels’ own numbers complicate the picture further. The EU itself was the fourth-largest buyer of Russian fossil fuels in March 2026, importing close to 10 percent of Russia’s export revenue among its top five customers — nearly all of it LNG and pipeline gas, neither under EU sanctions.
Who Actually Carries the Cost
Inside Russia, the government raised value-added tax to 22 percent in 2026 — the highest level since the tax was introduced at 28 percent in 1992. Every rate in between, for more than three decades, was lower.
It is a levy collected at every household’s till, not from the banks and shipping networks named on Brussels’ sanctions lists. The sanctions architecture targets entities — the bill for sustaining a war economy under that architecture has landed on ordinary consumption.
Outside Russia, the pattern repeats at scale. A global-health analysis of the war’s economic fallout found that the resulting rise in food and energy prices has fallen heaviest on the Global South.
These are populations with no seat at the table in Moscow, Brussels, or Kyiv — and no leverage over a war or a sanctions regime that neither started nor controls.
Twenty-plus sanctions rounds, $300 billion in frozen reserves, and one more list of 47 firms later, Brussels and Moscow each insist the other side is paying the price.
The trade and economic record points elsewhere. Beijing buys the discounted oil. Indian refiners adjust their invoices. Russian households absorb a tax increase. The EU itself keeps importing the energy it sanctions on paper. Global South markets absorb what remains.
Neither government named in this dispute has yet had to present that account.
